How You Eat Your Sandwich

July 12, 2016 by Gordon O. Yonel

Infinite Business Wisdom from How You Eat Your Sandwich

How you think about your lunch may determine your stance in your next management team meeting.

When taking decisions, we are all biased by what we lived in the past. Consequently, an accurate recount of any experience is essential. It has long been documented that eating a sandwich from one end to the other feels less satisfying after the fact than eating the same sandwich first all the way to the middle, then go back and start eating it from the other end, until finishing it off with the last bite of the tasty, juicy filled middle. Why is that? Because there is a distortion between what we experience in the moment and what we later remember that experience to be like. A filling-free, crusty end of a sandwich as the last bite makes us recall the experience as less fulfilling than eating the same sandwich as described above. This phenomenon was later published by 2002 Nobel-prize winner Daniel Kahneman as the Peak-End rule:

WHAT WE REMEMBER ABOUT THE PLEASURABLE QUALITY OF OUR PAST EXPERIENCE IS ALMOST ENTIRELY DETERMINED BY TWO THINGS:

How the experience felt when it was at its peak (best or worst)
How it felt when it ended.

So when you take decisions, you rely on the memories of an experience as retained in your mind at a future date, almost entirely negating other factors e.g., duration of the experience or the proportion of pleasurable over the less pleasurable parts of it. William Shakespeare must have known this intuitively back in the 16th century as he titled his play “All’s Well That Ends Well”.

THIS HAS WIDE-SPREAD IMPLICATIONS. ONE EXAMPLE IS IT MAY STEER YOU TO PREFER CHOICES THAT INVOLVE MORE PAIN OVER LESS.

Because what counts is the memory of a particular experience rather than how long or how painful it in reality has been; as long as the end felt less painful, or better, you will forever judge that experience with those two snapshot moments, i.e., the feeling at its peak, and by how it ended. Students on a college campus were exposed to two experiments, each consisting of two annoying, painfully high pitch and decibel sounds: the first one lasted 8 seconds only and was indeed very painful to endure. The second one lasted twice as long, the first 8 seconds of which being identical to the sound in the first experiment but followed immediately by another 8 seconds of a lesser (but still) annoying, lower pitch and decibel sound. Over two thirds of the students expressed preference for the second one (i.e., 16-second experiment) when quizzed which of the two experiments they would choose if asked to take only one of them again. In this case, they chose to have more pain to less because of how their memory processed that experience (i.e., 16-seconds of annoying sounds rather than 8 seconds). This tells us you don’t always know what you want.

This has wide spread ramifications in the way you arrive to your decisions in life, or in business, including when trying to beat the competition.